The Safety Scoop Tip of the Week

Over the holiday I found myself watching the marathon event of a show called "Destoryed in Seconds." For hours on end, there were clips of car crashes, flipped 4 wheelers, fires, plane crashes, train wrecks, etc. It was like eating potato chips. I couldn't stop at just one. During each scene, the narrator would discuss the underlying cause of the horrific event.

In many cases (make that most cases), the underlying cause was human error. Mother Nature can take the blame for some accidents (i.e., the plane crash that occurred when birds flew into the engine), but Mother Nature often has a helping hand - US. When people fail to evacuate when a hurricane is imminent, when a plane flies with missing bolts, when we don't slow down when road conditions are icy - we have a hand in our own destruction.

Safety professionals work hard trying to help others prevent accidents. It can be a frustrating and thankless task. Shutting down a job because of a safey infraction costs time and money. After watching "Destroyed in Seconds" you realize that it can also save lives.

This week my son brought home a poster they did in art class to promote ear care.As you can see, he drew the closest thing he could to an iPod (oh boy, does he want one, even though he doesn't even have any favorite songs!) Turns out everyone - at least all the cool kids have iPods. Which means that there are a lot of kids out there with the potential for hearing loss as they grow older. Kids play music loud. We've all done it. Heck, our parents (dinosaurs that they are) did it too. However, nowadays, we've added an extra element to the mix. Ear buds. Those little ear phones that are placed directly into the ear can boost the sound signal by as much as six to nine decibels.

Then there's the mix of volume and time. Volume: anything 80-85 decibels and higher is potentially harmful. MP3 players can reach, at maximum volume, 120 decibels. Time: you can judge for yourself how long your child keeps those ear buds in their ears. At a low volume, the potential damage to hearing is small. At maximum levels,
damage can occur in as little as 8-15 minutes.

We all need to be smart about our hearing. It's bad enough when grandpa has to keep saying "WHAD'YA SAY?" We don't need our kids saying it too.

This week, I'm going to take you back 41 years to when my husband was a 12-year-old boy. He was with his brother on the back of his dad's farm truck when his dad began backing up to get something forgotten in the barn. My husband said he could jump off and run back faster than dad could drive. His brother said, "don't, dad will run over you with the truck." With the invincibility born of super-hero comics, my husband said "not me!" So he jumped. He tripped, he fell and dad did indeed run over him with his truck. It was a horrific accident, I've been told. The results I can see for myself: deaf in one ear, paralyzed on one side of his face, arthritis in his hips from where they fractured. He was lucky to even live. Many other kids are not so lucky.

In the news recently we heard that Christian music star, Steven Curtis Chapman's 5 year old daughter was run over and killed in the driveway of the family home by her older brother. Accidents like these happen all too frequently. A car weighs thousands of pounds. A kid? Not so much.

Every day my son wants to "race the car" to the garage. All I can think of is "what if he slips and falls?" Even if he promises to stay way away from the car, I think "what if he falls and rolls?" After my son's baseball game, I constantly think: "there are too many kids running around and too many cars trying to leave." All these are scenarios for a potential accident. Drivers need to always be careful. The onus is on them to watch out for kids. Even though we tell (and tell!) our kids not to dart in front of cars, to look both ways, we all know that doesn't always happen. CDC data from July 2000-June 2001 states that 73% of the cases of fatal child/motor vehicle accidents occurred near a home and in 57% of the cases, the driver was the parent.

My tip for you this week is to take some extra time. To remember that kids are little and cars are big. Take the extra second to look - and to even look again - before you back up.

Before this past week, I would have said that accident proneness is just fiction. An excuse for not looking where you're going. However, as I sit here this week with a broken toe (!?!) I am rapidly revising my thoughts. In industry, there are usually reasons for being "accident-prone." For example, youth (I don't suffer from that one!), inexperience, a lack of safety training, a lack of sleep, and even a lack of exercise can contribute to a higher degree of accident/injuries. Combine that with the fact that approximately 10-15% of all injuries are caused by slips, trips and falls and you could be an accident waiting to happen. Throw in a slippery bathroom floor and I'm surprised I haven't broken anything sooner!

Here's my "could it happen to you?" scenario: My son had taken his shower earlier and left a wet and slippery floor. I'm running late and hurry into the bathroom to take my shower and POW! I slip backwards and, in a remarkable feat of acrobatics, manage to stay on my feet. However, my toe crumbles under my foot, causing great pain (along with some bad words and maybe some feeling-sorry-for-myself tears!) I never suspected it was broken until a call to my doctor sent me for an x-ray which confirmed her suspicions and made me realize how fragile those little bones in your toes can be. My toe is taped and I'm wearing shoes around the house and, for better or worse, have supplied my readers with yet another "it happened to me" true accident story. Do I think being accident prone is a fact? Not totally. What I do think is that outside circumstances (wet floor) and internal circumstances (late & hurrying and heck, throw in the lack of sleep and the lack of exercise!) all contributed to this accident. Remove even one of those factors and this accident might never have happened.

This tip is going to be short and sweet. As long as the sun is out and hot, you can burn!
The tip? Wear sunscreen.

When I announced that I was going to be writing a weekly safety tip and I'd already had a few lined up, someone asked me, "do they all have to happen to you?" No, but don't all the writing gurus tell you to "write what you know?" This weekend was opening season for baseball in our town. That meant all-day baseball. Baseball practice, the opening ceremonies, and finally, the game. (We lost, by the way, it is a young team and little boys are afraid of bigger
boys with "super-fast" pitches.) The weather here hasn't been overly warm so I was almost totally covered up with a sweater and jeans. I did have a v-neck shirt on....and that's where the trouble started. Every so often we could feel the sun beating down but it was never hot enough that I even thought of taking off my sweater. All of a sudden though, I could feel my chest itching. Did I get up and go to a store for sunscreen? No. I just baked. I'm one of those people
who don't turn a lovely shade of brown, I burn. And burn I did. The National Cancer Institute has this to say about skin cancer: "Most skin cancers form in older people on parts of the body exposed to the sun" They estimate that there are more than 1,000,000 new cases of skin cancer in 2008. What should I have done? What should we all do? Again, the Cancer Institute recommends:

Reducing exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation (UV radiation is a stream of invisible high-energy rays coming from the sun). Remember, tanning booths and sunlamps also produce ultraviolet radiation.
Changing your outdoor activity time to reduce the exposure to the high intensity UV radiation. Peak sun time is from 11am to 3pm.
Use adequate amounts of "sufficiently protective sunscreen." What that means - to the young girls who might read this, you buy sunscreen (the SPF factor should be high, 15 and above)....not tanning oil

People whose skin tans poorly or burns easily after sun exposure are particularly susceptible to skin cancer. I know that's me....is it you?

I'm writing today to tell you that burns are some of the most painful injuries going. Why? Because I am sitting
here with a blistered hand after....yes, you guessed it....a painful burn. I'll describe the scenario and you see if
it could happen to you. My parents came up for dinner on Sunday. I was showing off my culinary skills with
a recipe that called for the chicken to be cooked on the stovetop in a frying pan "which is oven safe." That meant
that after I got done partially cooking the chicken on the stovetop, I put the whole frying pan into the oven for
more cooking. The oven had been pre-heated to 400°. So far, so good. Once the chicken was done, it was removed
from the pan and placed on the stovetop. I used big oven mitts to take it out of the oven. However, and this is the
big moment....THEN I went to move the pan. Forgetting that the handle (which is usually cool when cooking on
the stovetop) had just come out of a 400° oven, I grabbed it with my hand. As you can guess, there was immediate
searing pain. Luckily for me, I had the sense to put it back down on the stovetop. Had I dropped it, boiling
hot grease would have fallen onto the floor and onto my feet. So, thank heaven for small favors.

I immediately plunged my hand into cold water...and kept it there. Every time the hand was removed from the
water, the most painful stinging I've ever experienced would engulf my hand. Cold running water was also
helpful, but with all the environmental issues nowadays, I couldn't justify keeping the water running for ages!
I had a plastic bag filled with ice that helped tremendously, however, when my family started expressing concern
for potential frostbite (have you noticed how when you are injured everyone has an opinion?) I opted for cold water
instead. A phone call to an after-hours doctor garnered me some additional help. A few aspirins for the pain were
what the doctor ordered. That night I slept with my hand in water — for your information, a plastic bowl, like a
salad container, is the perfect depth to dunk your hand in AND sleep! The next morning my hand was significantly
better. It blistered the bottoms of my fingers and the palm where the handle touched, but the pain and the redness
are pretty much gone. After any injury, you have to ask yourself, what did I do wrong? What could I have done
differently? The answer to my questions are pretty clear. A oven mitt, along with more attention to what was going
on in my environment (i.e., the pan had just come out of the oven) would have eliminated this accident.

An accident can happen anytime/anywhere. It is up to us to try to make sure it doesn't. Be aware of your
surroundings, try to think ahead as to possible scenarios and their potential outcomes. If an accident does
occur, learn from it and make sure it doesn't happen again. The painful reality is: sometimes we don't get the
opportunity to learn from our mistakes. One tragic accident can change our lives forever. Don't let it happen to you.

The Weekly Safety Tip